The Ryen Russillo Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell on His New Book, 'The Bomber Mafia'

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

Russillo is joined by author Malcolm Gladwell to discuss his new book, 'The Bomber Mafia.' They talk about the U.S. Air Force and its role in World War II, the Air Force's early technical difficulties, the feud between major general Haywood S. Hansell and major general Curtis LeMay, the development of napalm, and more (0:50). Then Ryen answers some listener-submitted Life Advice questions. (46:45). Host: Ryen Russillo Guest: Malcolm Gladwell Producers: Kyle Crichton and Steve Ceruti Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Air Force's role in the first half of the Second World War is basically about launching these incredibly costly, complicated, massive missions, first against Germany, then against Japan, where they send hundreds and hundreds of bombers and men to bomb targets deep inside germany and they don't hit them they're missing everything and it's like so that you know that's the first crisis of the second world war for these air force guys which is what do we do now that this idea that we'd hatch back in alabama doesn't work malcolm gladwell, Talking to Strangers, and his newest book, The Bomber Mafia, which is an incredible look at the Air Force and the clothes of World War II. We'll talk about them next. This is a real thrill.

Somebody who I've been reading for years, I know a lot of our listeners as well, the great Malcolm Gladwell. His most recent book, The Bomber Mafia, anybody that likes war history, and he kind of shares with us his passion for it. So let's kind of start. There's a bunch of different ways I could start this. I thought about it last night. But let's start with kind of a better understanding of what the Air Force was, where it was in its standing, who was actually in control of it, and how it kind of started to deviate from the normal process of where its kind of hierarchy was in the military. Yeah. So, yeah. So this is a book about this moment in the history of the Air Force. The Air Force is, at the beginning of the Second World War, through the Second World War, is part of the Army. And it's because the airplane is so new,'s like a it's this brand new technology that

no one particularly understands and the army is run by these guys who think it's just a toy and there's a group of young men who call themselves the bomber mafia who are in love with this technology and they're they're in they're at some army base in virginia and they have to do among other things cavalry training they have to do, among other things, cavalry training. They have to train on horses and muck out the stables. And they're literally like, what the fuck? We're obsessed with a technology that will literally, the most important technological revolution of the 20th century, or one of them. And you're making me, you know,

train on a horse every morning. And so they decide to leave and go to Montgomery, Alabama, to Maxwell Air Force Base, because they want to get as far away as possible from the Army brass in and around Washington. And it's the middle of nowhere. I mean, it's still kind of the middle. I don't want to diss Montgomery, but I've been there many times. It's still not, you know, it's the middle of no i mean it's still kind of the middle i don't want to diss montgomery but i've been in many times it's still not you know it's not paris but in 1935 it's like such a

backwater because they want to be as far away as possible and they start this kind of um internal revolution and they famously say if the back, the army brass back in Washington knew what we were doing down here in Alabama, they would fire us all. Because these guys think that the airplane is all that matters. And that they're going to render every other, every single part of modern warfare obsolete.

And so it's this crazy, there's like 10 of these guys, and it's this crazy insurgency within the army on the eve of the Second World War. And so my book is a story about what happens to these guys when they bring their insurgency into real combat. And more generally, though, it's about this idea of dreamers, about what is the place of people who get obsessed with some new and bold and crazy idea, and what happens when that idea confronts the establishment.

And it's one of the kind of oldest and grandest narratives of all, right, is the newcomer confronts the, the old guard, and it has so much kind of, I felt in writing this book that I, you know, it feels so contemporary too, like, because we see versions of this conflict now in the present day, you know, everywhere we look. And so, I don't know, it was a really, really, really cool story to tell. What I like about this, and it's a theme at times where, you know, you do challenge things and then you try to get us to think about something a little bit differently. But this is a little bit more, you know, pragmatic in the sense of like, hey, this is the way we do things.

This is how we send out bombing missions. And this is what we do. This is a formation. This is the altitude. This is the, you know, trying to calculate risk. And you make a, I mean, it's not even a compelling point. You basically blast through. And the people at the time from the bomber mafia were like, wait a minute, why are we doing this way? Can you run

through some of, some of the calculations and realizing like these bomber missions that we would read about and how successful they were, they were incredibly inefficient. Um, and it was, it was based on assumptions and the assumptions never being challenged. And I think that's kind of one of the core things from this book is that this group, this bomber mafia, were like, well, wait a minute. Like, if we keep, like, what are the numbers? And they'd have these bombing missions in World War II into Germany where actually when you look back at the numbers, they were astonishingly terrible. Like, and people would, but then they would write up reports as if they were overwhelmingly successful. And the math was so off.

Yeah, so the basic problem is a physics problem. off. Yeah. So the basic problem is a physics problem. So you have the, the baro mafia are obsessed with bombers, which is a bombers are brand new in this, in the thirties, this idea that you can build a plane that's really big, um, powerful that can fly really, really high and really, really fast. And their idea was bombers were so powerful and large and fast that no fighter, no, no fighter plane could ever catch them, shoot them down. They were going to be impervious to any kind of, no anti-aircraft missile could ever bring them down. They could not be stopped. And so they said, oh, if the bomber can't be stopped, then it can win the war all by itself. But the only way for that dream to work is if the bomb that you drop from 25,000 feet can hit its target. And the bomber mafia assume they can figure that problem out. And they develop this incredibly

complex and expensive analog computer called the Nordenbomb site, which they believe will allow them to, they could be going 250 miles an hour at 25,000 feet and they can hit, they can drop one bomb and they're aiming on a bridge and they'll be able to hit the bridge. That's their assumption. But they run into the problem, which is that actually it's really, really hard.

Solving the physics problem of how to drop a bomb from 25,000 feet when you're going 250 miles an hour and there's a wind blowing and there's temperature change and there's clouds you know obscuring the target and it turns out to be an almost impossible problem to solve from um from uh in in the 1940s using 1940s technology. To use a sports analogy, you know, the really simple version of this, you would think that a world-class athlete standing at the foul line, shooting a foul shot without anyone's hands in their face,

with, you know, you should be able to do that with 95% accuracy, right? But you can't. In fact, there are some people who can't even do it with 50% accuracy. People who are making millions of dollars a year. It's a physics problem. You have to have a reproducible motion. You put a very large ball in a very small... So the physics problem of dropping a bomb from 25,000 feet is a thousand times more complicated than that. And human beings tend to think these accuracy problems are a lot easier than they are.

And so the Barron Mafia, the first problem they have in the Second World War is they can't do what they dreamt of doing back in Alabama. They can't hit anything. And so the first, the Air Force's role in the first half of the Second World War is basically about launching these incredibly costly, complicated, massive missions, first against Germany, then against Japan, where they send hundreds and hundreds of bombers and men to bomb targets deep inside Germany. And they don't hit them. They're missing everything. And it's like, so that's the first crisis of the Second World War for these Air Force guys, which is,

what do we do now that this idea that we'd hatch back in Alabama doesn't work? What do you do when you can't hit anything, right? You have to change strategy. And so that's the second half of the book is devoted to what is the strategy they choose when option one doesn't work. And that second strategy is steeply morally problematic. Right. And I want to get to that because that kind of is where you intro us into Curtis LeMay and Heywood Hansel. Why don't you give me a little backstory of both of them and then how that ultimately leads to the decision in Guam, which starts basically the second half of World War II. Yeah. So the book is really a

story about two men who are, they hate each other. That's the first thing that should be said, because they represent different sides in this debate about how should we conduct bombing campaigns in the Second World War. He's one of the ringleaders of this group. And Hansel, they're all young, these guys. They're all in their 20s and 30s. They are obsessed with the promise of military aviation. They are, you know, Hansel is one of those guys who does one of the first forms of those acrobatic flyers. He's the guy who does tricks in the air. And he's a brilliant pilot. He's a dreamer. He's a poet. Once when he's coming back from bombing missions over Europe and you've got a plane full

of guys who have just seen their life pass before their eyes and they're 19 years old and they're scared out of their minds, he would sing them Broadway show tunes to calm them down. I mean, he's this kind of, he's handsome. He's from a long Southern family of military. You know, his great-grandfather is like a Confederate general. He has like the scarf around his neck. He's just this kind of like, my favorite story about Heywood Hansel is, these guys work all the time.

They are never home. He has a baby at home. He finally goes to see his wife and baby. Like he hasn't been home for months. And in the middle of dinner, he hears sounds. He turns to his wife and says, what's that sound? She goes, that's your son. He's crying. He doesn't even know what his baby sounds like. He's like, these guys are like, they're so, this is so not possible in 2021 to live the kind of life these guys lead. They, and by the way, this is a point where he's, his wife is in Northern Virginia and he's been detailed to Washington DC for a few months.

He doesn't even go and see his family. And he's like two miles away. Like that's, these guys are just like, it's just another, it is a, it is our grandparents generation. It is so not ours. So he's one side of the argument and he thinks he's a dreamer. He's, he's Elon Musk. He's like the kind of like romantic version of Elon Musk. He just thinks that he's in love with what technology can promise.

Curtis LeMay is the opposite. Curtis LeMay is this kind of working class guy from Columbus, Ohio, who puts himself through Ohio State, whose family is like, got an alcoholic dad who's never there. He's got like eight siblings and he's the eldest, he's the provider.

He never says, he's this guy, he always has a cigar in his mouth. He's famously the most taciturn. In fact, there's a famous story about years later when he's head of the Air Force, he gets briefed before the Bay of Pigs, the famous botched invasion of Cuba that Kennedy launches in 1962, 61. And LeMay's in the room for the briefing and it goes on for like hours. He doesn't say a word. At the end, he gets

up, takes his cigar out of his mouth and just says, won't work and leaves. That's the kind of guy he is. He's like this, he looks like he's got like a, he looks like a linebacker. He's got like a square head and a big barrel chest. And he is brutal and he is

bloodthirsty and he is uh he's a genius he's maybe the greatest combat commander one of the greatest combat commanders of the second world war and people are terrified of him and he becomes convinced that everything the bomber mafia is saying and doing is a pile of horseshit he just just has no time for it. And they involve him in one of their earliest, most disastrous campaigns, this bombing attack on Schweinfurt. And it just, he becomes convinced that if these guys continue to run the air war, we're going to lose to the Nazis and to the Japanese. And so there's a kind of blood feud that develops between Hansel and Curtis LeMay.

And that's the, my book is a kind of the emotional center of the book is the conflict between these two incredibly disparate guys. It is weird reading stories like this in today's day because you like um you read about lemay and and you're like okay well this guy was he i mean he's one of his nicknames is the demon but you go okay is this i mean i'm not getting into like hey is this problematic countries are trying to win a war here right they're trying to trying to prevent Nazi Germany from expanding. So this isn't something that in today's day and age, you never know how people talk about things. But he had one mission, and that was to end this thing as quickly as possible. And I think there's a part of it where you could describe him as this

bad person because he was so bad. But at the same time like his rationalization for things actually led to him wanting things to be more as civil which i know sounds crazy but that's kind of one of the points of the book that i think really brings it together because i mean he's somebody too that would be like look this is what we're gonna do we're gonna fly to lower altitude and i'm gonna be in the front and if you guys abort then you're gonna get core marshal like it was to the point where these bombers were going in these raids and guys are just peeling off left and right and then when he says nope we're done with that and by the way i'll be in the front and i'm going to lead every single mission so for anyone that has any military background whatsoever the admiration

that you have to have for him as vicious as the the outcome had to be for the war to end the way it did, there's a lot to be said about just a level of respect that you would have for somebody that would say, okay, and I'll be in the front plane, which is, I think, why there's so much respect for him. Yeah. So this is, this is actually a fascinating little, what was happening in the early days of the Second World War is the guys would go on bombing missions and you would be, you'd go into your, um, your, you know, your, your final approach to the target and you want to get relatively low to maximize your chances of hitting the target. And what would happen is that you've got some 20 year old kid from wherever, Kansas, whatever,

he's, he's probably been on, you know, a year ago he was in high school and he's piloting one of these planes and they would get scared, understandably. There would be enemy fighters coming at them and anti-aircraft fire from the ground. And what would happen is just at the moment when they should have been lining up the target. They would get scared and they would do evasive maneuvers. They'd basically just start moving the plane all around, trying to dodge the fire. And finally, sometimes they would just peel away and not even, and just drop the bombs

wherever they wanted to drop them. And so that the whole thing would be a waste. So an incredible amount of time and energy was spent, was wasted in these bombing runs, because guys just weren't dropping their bombs on a target. And LeMay, in classic LeMay fashion, just says, this has to end. That we're going to go steady, fly steady and straight towards the target, regardless of how much anti-aircraft fire is, and regardless of how much enemy fighter activity there is. And I am going to lead the first one of these, you know, what sounds like a suicide mission. It's not a suicide mission. I'll show you why.

And I'll be in the front of this, of the attack. of the attack. And if anyone, he said, and if anyone doesn't follow my lead and fly steady and straight towards the target, I will court-martial your ass, right? It's like he just, and people, they begin to realize that it doesn't sound, it's not as suicidal in practice

as it sounded in kind of in theory. And he convinces people that you can actually fly steady and straight towards the target and you won't. Your chances of getting shot down by the enemy are not greater. But he had, this is a guy with, I mean, an insane amount of almost reckless courage.

And anyone who flew with him, who served under him, just had an incredible amount of respect for him. I mean, to the point where I talked to some people who, you know, these 90-year-old retired Air Force guys who knew LeMay back in the day, and if, you know, if hypothetically LeMay had walked in the room, they would have dropped everything and saluted him and followed him wherever he said, we're going to Afghanistan and we're going to they would go like, it's that kind of, you know, that rare kind of, it almost seems like, I don't know whether anyone does this anymore. Like that kind of loyalty people would have to a leader where you would be, you'd be willing to put aside all considerations of your

own safety for whatever cause the leader says is the right one. You know, Martin Luther King was that kind of person. You know, there are coaches, old school, I'm sure John Wooden was that kind of person. You know, you could find these people, but they're the number of people who can, who are capable of inspiring people to follow them in that way is really small. I mean, it's, it's vanishingly small. It's vanishingly small. I don't know how much you want to get into with the challenges of attacking Japan because I'm reading those chapters going,

you've got these guys going up and they're coming back and reporting tailwind speeds that people back on base think they're lying about. You have the Himalayan path where the amount of gas it would take to deliver gas was like four times as much just getting over these mountain ranges um and all of these problems were with haywood hansel in charge ultimately leads to the government saying all right like it's over we're putting in lemay um yeah give us give us some of the background and all this stuff because

it's just sometimes you can forget that even though it's only 60 something years ago you know that it it can be not that long ago and forever ago all at the same time because reading the reactions to these failed missions over japan you'd be like wait a minute so what how could you guys understand it's like no people just didn't they didn't understand the jet stream then. Yeah. So the war against Japan poses this massive geographical problem, which is Japan is really, really, really far away. And we don't have planes that can fly thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. So the question is, the only way we can get Japan to surrender, it's an island nation, is we have to, we want to bomb them. How do you bomb them if you can't

reach them? So the first way we solve this problem is in 1944, we, there's an incredibly brutal set of battles in the mid Pacific, South Pacific, for the Mariana Islands, Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. Some of them was brutal fighting of the war. The Marines take those three islands. And the reason, these are little volcanic specks in the middle of the Pacific. The only reason we spend weeks and weeks and sacrifice thousands of lives to seize these islands is that if we control the marianas we can reach japan um it's within the range of a b-29 bomber which is a huge huge huge deal it's just within the range i mean when i say just i mean like if you if you miscalculate even by a little you will fall into the ocean short when you're coming home because you'll run out of fuel.

So we seize the Marianas and we set up these, we built, they built three of the biggest airports in the world on these three little volcanic islands. And we start to launch attacks on Japan. And it sounds like it's going to be pretty straightforward. on Japan. And it sounds like it's going to be pretty straightforward. And that's when Heywood Hansel comes in with his bomber mafia ideas and says, we can do precision bombing against Japan from the Mariana Islands. And it doesn't work out that way. And the second half of my book is all about the unexpected problems that you face when you're trying to attack Japan with pretty primitive technology. And you run into something, among other things, things you've never heard of or thought of before. One of them is the jet stream, that if you're flying at 25,000 feet over Japan,

there are winds that are so powerful that they will mess with everything you're doing. And, you know, there's all kinds of other issues that they run into. And what happens ultimately is the failure of the bomber mafia in bringing the fight against Japan in 1944 leads to Heywood Hansel being replaced with Curtis LeMay. That these two antagonists, these guys who hate each other, one guy gets fired, and the new guy,

they kick out the dreamer, and they bring in, basically, Woody Hayes. Which is what... What a perfect way of putting it, yeah. Curtis LeMay. I mean, both of them are both Ohio State guys. I mean, it's like perfect. They kind of look the same.

And that's the bloodiest and the most kind of brutal chapter of the Second World War is what Curtis LeMay does to Japan in the summer of 1945. It's like, what happens when you bring in the guy who has no illusions whatsoever, no grand attachment to technologies, no commitment to fighting a kind of clean and perfect war? What happens when you bring in the complete pragmatist whose only goal is to win the war as quickly and as efficiently and as savagely as possible. And that is a legacy we've been living with for the last 75 years.

Yeah, I was trying to think of the equivalent of Hansel then if he's Woody Hayes. And I was thinking like Mark Trestman, the Bears brought him in from Montreal to be like, all right, we're going to do this. And then people were like, I love this. It's outside the box until they didn't love it anymore um i had no idea the first napalm bomb was was set off on harvard's campus yes as a boston guy as a boston guy or a new england guy um napalm the weirdest the weirdest part of reporting this book was this whole thing. I thought that napalm was a Vietnam War invention. It's not.

It was invented at Harvard during the Second World War, explicitly to be used against Japan. Because Japanese cities were made out of wood. And the houses were really close together. And there were very few parks and they were tinderboxes. And so the army was like, wait a second, you don't want to use a conventional explosive against cities that are made of wood. Let's use an incendiary. You want to burn them down. You don't want to blow them up. And so they bring in

all the fire guys. There's a whole cadre of people who are experts in fire and they say build us the greatest incendiary bomb ever something that can burn anything down and so a bunch of this brilliant harvard chemist um comes up with this idea of basically making a jellied form of gasoline that you put it you put inside of a canister you drop the canister and you have these globs of jellied gasoline that will explode and attach themselves to whatever surface they land on and it will burn the thing he comes up with burns hotter and faster than any incendiary weapon that had ever been created before before and that's napalm napalm is is an insanely um uh effective and brutal weapon it burns everything it touches

and they use it hansel gets kicked out and uh because he can't hit anything and he's been trying to bomb japan they bring in LeMay and LeMay says, you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to napalm the entire country of Japan. And that's what he does in the summer of 1945. He napalms 66 Japanese cities. He essentially burns the country to the ground.

And that's the climax of the book. And it is the most kind of overlooked bit of American, recent American history. Between that and, well, yes, it is. I think it is one of the most overlooked bits of American history. This incredibly savage rain of fire that Curtis LeMay visits on Japan in the summer of 45, where he probably kills close to a million Japanese civilians in one summer. A million civilians in a space of two and a half months. And this is before the two atomic bombs, which I was like, wait,

are you serious? As you go through the numbers. Now, as we finish the conversation, the thing that no one expects when you're reading the book and aren't going to expect, why did Japan honor him almost 20 years later? It's one of the great, I mean, it's one of the great mysteries.

LeMay is given in the 1960s, 1950s or 60s, the highest honor Japan can bestow upon a non-Japanese person. And it's said to be because of his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force after the war, which he does do. He goes back to Japan. After reducing Japan to ashes in the summer of 45 and killing more Japanese than any person in human history, he is invited back to help them rebuild their Air Force.

And he does it and does such a good job that they give him a prize. The Japanese were determined to put their, to put the Jap, their experience and their memories of the second world war behind them. I mean, I think it's the best way I can describe it. They, I mean, even to this day, you know, the only memorial in Japan to the firebombing of Tokyo in the summer of 45 is a little private museum that some random guy built,

not even a government museum. I mean, it's, you are hard pressed to find any kind of public discussion or mention of the firebombing of Japan in Japan today, in contemporary Japan today. It's just a different cultural attitude towards historical tragedy. I mean, this country has a very different approach. You know, we very aggressively memorialize things. Um, I did a podcast episode last year on

the nine 11 Memorial. I mean, we spent billions of dollars memorializing nine 11. Um, that's not the way that other cultures do it. I have a bigger question for you. I really enjoyed talking to strangers, the default to truth. I started thinking about the process of that. You explain it pretty frankly in that if we decided to go another way, we wouldn't get a lot done once we get out the door. But in all the ways you've looked at our society and then societies throughout the world, are you more impressed with things that we've done or more disappointed? When you say we, you mean? People.

People. Yeah. More impressed. an optimist and I'm aware and I am, you know, very much aware of how we have it better than any other generation in history and any other. So it's like, it's very hard for me not to be, and I'm in awe of some of the institutions that we've created. I mean, one of the things, just to go back briefly to the book, I didn't know a lot about the Air Force,

and I came away from writing my book just blown away by the Air Force. Man, what an amazing institution that is. And the people I met in the Air Force were, you know, some of the most impressive group of people I've ever encountered in my life who have devoted their lives to the defense of the United States. And, you know, who make, I don't know what they make. They don't make what they could make in the private sector. That's for sure. And I don't know what they make. They don't make what they could make in the private sector, that's for sure. And I don't know. I just think the idea, and it's funny, I've told the story before,

but in the middle of last summer, the middle of, there was a moment last summer where things were as crazy as they will maybe ever be, you know, middle of Trump craziness, election craziness, COVID craziness. It really seemed like the world was going to hell in a handbasket. And the Air Force had a changeover from the old chief of staff to the new guy, General Brown, from General Goldfein to General Brown. And I watched it on, it was a live stream of the changeover ceremony. And it was so dignified, so thoughtful, so emotionally moving. A series of people stood up and gave these speeches, isn't the right word, they just,

they spoke in a moving way about this country, about the Air Force, about what the guy leaving the post was all about and who the guy coming in was all about and what their families were like. And it was also fascinating, the new chief of staff of the Air Force is an African-American. The secretary of the Air Force at that point was a woman. The outgoing secretary of the Air Force was a woman.

It was just like a different America. In the middle of all this crazy dysfunction of last summer, I just got a glimpse of this institution that was more than thriving. It represented all of America. It was a true meritocracy. It was in the middle of the craziness. It was having a peaceful transition of America. It was a true meritocracy. It was in the middle of the craziness. It was having a peaceful transition of power. The head of the Joint Chiefs, this guy, General Milley,

I don't know if you've ever gave this speech that was like, if any politician running for higher office in this country gave a speech half as good as his speech, they would win in the landslide. It's like this guy, like 90% of Americans don't know the name of the person who runs the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That guy is a funny, incredibly intelligent,

unbelievably charismatic. He's a dude who I would follow into combat. It's like, you just realize the rest of the world may be falling apart but there are there are parts of this country that that are really really strong and powerful and you know you they will be around for a long time um and it just made me i wept at the end of watching this i was just like you know you know, and I came out, I was so much more optimistic after it was over

than I was going in. And I've carried that optimism with me ever since. Like, we're not, it's so easy to get convinced by the dysfunction of a few small areas of this country into thinking the dysfunction's everywhere. It's not this country into thinking that this functions everywhere. It's not. It's just not. It's like most things in this country work really well.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Air Force campus in Colorado, and you nailed it. The description, it's inspiring, makes you feel like in a way inadequate, but not in a way where you're driving away depressed. All of those kids in the FOS Academy are so much smarter than you are. Yeah. You, you look around and you know, there's, I don't know if it sounds cheesy or outdated, but it's, I, that's how I felt like this, this call to service that you go, all right. You know, call to service that you go, all right. I love the book, man. I don't want to share too much more of it, even though we already have, but I think people are going to really enjoy it because

there's so many little details. There's more LeMay stuff in there at the end, especially when you just start to paint a picture of who he is as a man when you go to his house and hear these these stories but the last thing i wanted to ask you about because i'm an avid listener as well the revisionist history you get season six out now um when you this is amazing because this was like one of those things that we would go to the u.s news and world report college rankings and i mean talk about having a guest dead to rights about the reputation score. And so if you could kind of share, like, you knew you had them. You were nice about it in the most clear way you could be. But this was a big deal.

Like, people love to rank stuff. We love to read rankings. When I'm applying to colleges, I'm looking at them all in the bookstore being like, okay, you know, could I get this one? You know, where is my school rank now? And you're like wait a minute what happened but this whole thing was was basically like at the extremes it made sense but the voting process was totally out of control outdated criminal and yet and yet the denial in the interview was hilarious because the guy seemed like a nice enough guy, but you were just like, this doesn't make any sense, sir. And he was like, well, and he was trying to find ways to shave off some of the facts. It just wasn't very convincing. So whatever direction you want to go, because I thought that was really funny. And I had, you know, no one had really done a deep dive on it before. So I enjoyed it. so I enjoy it. One of my favorite things in revisionist history over the years has been, you know, I love going after American higher ed, which I think is just so full of nonsense.

And I had, years ago, I interviewed the president of Stanford, and I was asking him about his endowment, because Stanford's got, what, $25 billion in the bank. And I asked him a very simple question, which is, would he ever consider giving any of that money to a school that didn't have a big deal? And he just like, his head exploded. It was so hilarious. Anyway, I had a similar moment with this one. The US News rankings, the most important, people don't realize this, the most important variable in their algorithm determines how they rank you. It's what they call a reputation score. And the reputation score is generated by asking all of the college presidents in the country to rank every other school in the country

on a scale of one to five. So right away, we're in high comedy territory because like, so how would you know, right? My big point, which I raised with the guy who runs the US News Rankings, I was like, you know, if big point which i raised with the guy who runs the u.s news rankings i was like you know if i gave them they i gave them the examples of a jesus school gonzaga a more uh an orthodox jewish school uh yeshiva and a and a mormon school bring him young so we're asking the

president of bring him young to rank yeshiva on a scale of one to five. Has the president of Brigham Young ever been to Yeshiva? Do they know anything about Orthodox Jewish, whatever? Similarly, we're asking the head of Yeshiva to rank Gonzaga. Why would he give a Jesuit school a good score? He's like opposed to the Jesuits, right? I mean, it's ludicrousness. It goes on and on and on. And none of that.

I could just see the guy being like, put a three next to him. That's right. And you talk, I started calling up college presidents and I would say, how do you, there's 300 colleges on this list and you're asked to rank them.

Do you know anything about these schools? And they're like, no, I don't know. And then one guy I talked to, in order to get people to know his school better, he sends, he makes his own hot sauce

and he would send a hot sauce to all the other college presidents to get them to know his school better, he makes his own hot sauce. And he would send a hot sauce to all the other college presidents to get them to vote for his school. Like it's this crazy thing. But anyway, I got the guy who runs the US News rankings. And I just sort of walking him through the absurdity of this reputation score system. And it was a situation where he knows it's bullshit,

but his job depends on him pretending that it's not bullshit. And it was, it was kind of painful and hilarious at the same time, but there are, you know, and it was a reminder, there are a class of people in this country who are in that very unenviable position where they are required to defend the defenseless. You know, you're, you know, in your heart, it's like being, imagine being. It's like working for the NCAA. It is exactly like that.

Or being the press officer to Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's like at a certain point, you're like, oh man, life's too short. Do I really have to like go on about QAnon today? Or do I have to pretend an amateurism for one more? Yeah. Yeah. The NCAA is the only other major American institution that is as aggressively stupid as the US News rankings.

I don't know. I often, I have these fantasies about what would be the simplest fix for the NCAA? And I think it's moving them. It doesn't really matter where you move them, which they're all, because they're in Kansas City. So were you arguing like a change of scenery? So like a trade at the baseball deadline

where you just get a reliever in a new city and we just expect it's going to be better? It's exactly what it is. It's exactly what it is. It's exactly what it is. It's like Lonzo Ball needs a new change of city. But they all live in like, they're in like Overland Park or something in Kansas City. I know a little bit about Kansas City.

The thing about Kansas City is, I know where they all live. They all live in the country club district. Kansas City is a beautiful place to live. You can live, you have a really high standard of living. You send your kids to first-class public schools. You're in a bubble.

You're in a middle America bubble, right? And your notion of what's going on in all of these colleges that you're ruling over all around the country is so minimal. They got to force them. Let's move them to the west side of Philadelphia. Let's move them to like the West side of Philadelphia. Let's move them to, let's move them to Rochester. Let's make them suffer through an upstate New York winter. Let's make, let's make them, let's move them to Northern California where they can't afford to live anywhere. And there's a wildfire every two years. Just do something to shake them up and alert them to the complexities of the world but

that little part of people that they're just not in real america right okay but kansas city is it isn't it indy though is it indianapolis or is there another location i thought they're in kansas city they're in overland park okay well because i i know that there's some there's some some of it's located in india yeah so you you want them you want to de-bristolize them is what you're saying i want to take yes yes espn would be another i remember going to the espn campus for the first time when did you go what were you promoting i went came out what i was doing but it was right after they had just paid millions of dollars for rick reiling and i was that's an amazing date and time it was right after they had just paid millions of dollars for rick reiling and i was

that's an amazing date and time it was fantastic and i remember why you would i had a while ago yeah i had a meeting with all of this is years ago with all of the brass and i brought i was like they were talking but they were their the question was for me was how do we make esp and we want to keep it cutting edge. We started out as this kind of, you know, bad-ass outsiders. We're worried we're becoming part of the establishment. We're losing contact with younger sports fans.

How do we be bad-ass? I just put it out. Well, one way to be bad-ass is not to give millions of dollars to Rick Riley. Oh, so they brought you in as, as this respected voice, like this observer and they wanted to pick your brain. Oh, so they brought you in as this respected voice, like this observer, and they

wanted to pick your brain. Oh, man. They wanted to pick my brain. Did they have to pay you for this, by the way? They had to have paid you a little bit. No, no. I came for fun. I just thought it'd be fun. I got invited. I was there just to visit with... I can guess who invited you. Walsh. Yeah, absolutely.

I love Walsh. And I've become Yeah, absolutely. I love Walsh. I love Walsh. And I've become friendly with him. And I went to see him. But I was like, that Rick Riley, to this day, the Rick Riley hire, like a guy who was so like, I mean, in his day was a great journalist. I loved him back in the day. But by the end, he just was so over sports.

He just didn't want to be a sports writer anymore, right? You could just tell. He was like the movie critic. There's a certain point in the movie critic's life where they just don't like the movies anymore. You can just tell.

They're just not, they hate them all. It's just, I think Rick Riley wanted to do something else, but he was pigeonholed as a, and like. You know what?

I'm going to share a story with you too, because this was something, as somebody who would talk, you know, I was talking more hours a week than almost anyone there. There's a handful of us. Right. And you'd have to be a radio guy to even qualify for most hours talking in the air, but you get to a certain point and then every now and then a suit would bring you in. And sometimes you think you were catching up or expanding your own career and, you know, building this relationship. I spent a good 45 minutes being told why Rick

Riley was the right hire when I didn't even bring it up. We just had time on the books. And by the way, good for Rick Riley. He got paid a ton. And I don't care about pretty much anybody getting paid a lot. It should just raise all tides here. But I could tell that it was internally going over so poorly that he was almost like, you know, and again, there were more influential voices than me at ESPN. I'm not delusional, but it was almost like, let me, you know, we got Rosillo's on the schedule this week. Let me sell him on this Rick Riley hire. And I was pitched that it basically, hey, for $15 million, we destroyed Sports Illustrated. And I was kind of like, I think the internet had a little bit to do with it too though no it was just like you dick which is why i probably didn't

do as well as i could have but what was hilarious was how much rick riley drove simmons crazy it was one of those things like you know there's certain things that just set him off like riley you just you even you even just use the initials rr around simmons at that point in his life and he would just just like lose his shit because absolutely like because he was the future and raleigh was the past and they were more interested in the past in the future like that was wrong that's that's also like a great reminder of the decision makers you know like i remember a friend telling me once and it's one of my favorite lessons is like the reason why you can cork wine and bring it home is that the people that vote on that

stuff want to do it. The selectmen in your town want to be able to cork a bottle of wine they haven't finished and bring it home. And that's why that law exists. And most people aren't going to give you a to-go cup when you leave a bar because those people aren't voting on that kind of stuff. And when you have the decision makers at that time at espn going rick riley fucking live rick riley like read back page all the time like done and done um i didn't know i didn't know bill that well back then so i was not privy to those conversations next time

next time you're on a pod with bill just just just randomly drop just say the words Rick Riley and see what happens. It's hilarious. It is hilarious. It's like, if Bill was being interrogated by some hostile power and they wanted to sort of torture him, they would just play, remember Riley used to have that, just play tape of Rick Riley. And Bill would be like, all right, all right, I'll tell you everything. Just stop with Rick Riley. And Bill will be like, all right, all right, I'll tell you everything.

Just stop with Rick Riley. I'm going to try to pull that off next time. I'll try to subtly slide it in there. Hey, congrats on the book. I know how much work you put into this. I just want you to know how much those of us enjoy it and appreciate the work. Oh, thank you. So this was a lot of fun. I'm glad we finally got to do this.

Yeah. Thank you, Ryan. You want details? Bye. I drive a Ferrari 355 Cabriolet. What's up? I have a ridiculous house in the South Fork. I have every toy you could possibly imagine.

And best of all, kids, I am liquid. So now you know what's possible. Let me tell you what's required. All right. It's everybody's favorite segment here. Another edition of Life Advice. The email is lifeadvicerr at gmail.com. Okay.

6-3, 2-15. A fit but not jacked 205 before COVID. Working and getting back. Not going to pretend I'm a 10. But not going to deny I'm probably 8, 8.5 on a good day. Not that that's how I think. No, it's just the first thing you said in the fucking email. Just hard to convey attractiveness succinctly via email without a pic, which would be, yeah, not sending pics via mail.

Honestly, guys are sending pics nonstop now to this address, which is kind of funny. We promise we will not use those. Although, Cerruti was thinking about just starting a bunch of burner dating sites with guys that email the show. I was like, let's not do that. I'm just kidding. That's not what I was going to do. All right.

Anyway, 43, good education, professional degree and job. Made good money from my late 20s until recently when I started questioning the crazy hours I work at a job I don't love. I'm not one of those follow your bliss types who thinks that everyone should be doing their dream job. Someone has to take out the trash and God bless them for it. But it matters to me that I do something I feel proud of beyond I don't love. I'm not one of those follow your bliss types who thinks that everyone should be doing their dream job. Someone has to take out the trash and God bless them for it, but it matters to me that I do something I feel proud of beyond the money it pays. A couple months ago, I quit my job, budgeted for

a year with a mix of savings, supplemental from part-time consulting, and take the time to get back into some things I enjoy that I used to be good at, like writing while catching up on reading, putting together a plan for a consulting business. Is this guy, is this me emailing? Anyway, putting together a plan for a consulting business. Is this guy, is this me emailing? Anyway, putting together a consulting business. So the guy wants to open up a consulting business,

the mix of what I used to do, plus some discount pro bono charitable work for causes. Companies I think deserve a leg up. If all goes well, I'll make 75% of what I made before, but working only 80% of the time and being 50% more satisfied. All right, so the guy's just banging out some ratios for us. At the same time, I'm reevaluating my personal life. Between college and my late 30s, I had three long-term relationships. Two were about three years and one was five years, including one engagement that I broke off and quite a few six-weekers, as my friends and I call them, someone hot enough to keep

your attention for six weeks, but not a long-term prospect. As I approached 40, I decided I was tired of the six-weekers and wanted a long-term relationship, preferably leading to marriage. In retrospect, I wish I decided this 10 years earlier. I think what he's saying here, he's like, okay, in retrospect, I wish I decided this 10 years earlier. Again, as you said, our guy here is 43. Shout out to the 30-year-olds who are enjoying playing the field

and think there are no trade-offs. All right, a little stern there. Maybe he didn't say or think about, I don't know. There's a wording here I'm not figuring out. Because as of now, I'm caught in an awkward age position where if I want to have multiple children, I really need to meet a woman who is in her early 30s at the latest. Here's the math in my head. Even with a perfect sequence of events, if I meet someone today, I'd want to date for at least a year before I'd be ready to get engaged. I've

learned from experience that anything less than that, you don't really know someone. Then say a year till the wedding could be less, but let's say a year. Then another year to have a child, it all goes smoothly. That's three years, give or take, at which point she and I will be each three years older. Yes, we follow. Add another two years for a second child and more and more for more children. I'm starting

to feel like the Ben Stiller guy, the insurance risk guy. Add more years for more children. Not sure how many I like, but i'm one of three and that feels right but we'll see i know that the miracles of modern science women can have children into their early 40s and obviously so can men so they're increasing risk there too but i also know far too many couples my age who put off marriage and children and have spent the years and tens

of thousands of dollars trying and the stress is damaged and broken the relationships even if they're successful they're usually only one child and the health risks are not insignificant. My problem is I find dating a 30 year old in my stage or my age strange. Obviously, some are super smart, worldly and are more mature than me, but I still find it strange and I'm self-conscious, especially when it comes to meeting and hanging out with their friends. And Steve Buscemi, hello, fellow kids meme starts flashing in my head. So my question, do I just suck it up and accept that or given the choices i made in my 30s i

just have to pretend to care about taylor swift and learn to speak emoji or do i resign myself to the chance that i might not have the family i thought i would have and go out with women closer to my age late 30s who i like and usually find more all-around attractive uh weird how that happens to you when you hit a certain age. Or do I get a dog and really lean into the emotionally distant, but fun to hang out with and travel guy who knows the world and likes to share it on his terms

or deep down nurtures a pain he'll never talk about, which is who I'm gradually becoming unless I make one of these other choices. Appreciate any advice you would give. I probably thought about some of these things. All right, here's the deal. I've definitely thought about all this stuff.

You are definitely, I'm a thinker. You are hammering the thought process on this one to a point where you're kind of in your own head. All right, I'm going to share one. Like if I, this happened before COVID, moved to Manhattan Beach, whatever, guy invites me to this deal. I'm immediately the oldest guy there.

I sized up that I was the oldest guy there. And guess who didn't have a very good time and had no chance, no prospects? Me, because I made a decision. Just like the story about me talking about how my dad would be like, hey, you lost the game on the ride over before we even got to the court. You will lose this game of pursuit of marriage and happiness and kids and family. You will lose this once you decide. You think about everything, man. There's a lot of math in all this stuff, right? So it's, hey, here's my ratio of what I think I can do and how much I can make and what number I'll be proud of.

Okay, so now let's talk about my long-term relationships, three years, three years, and five years, now six weekers. Okay, so I wish I had decided I'd done this 10 years earlier. And look, I'll tell you, a lot of people that do have kids, almost every one of them says, the only thing I wish I hadn't done was wait, which sucks. I don't even like saying that out loud. Stings a little,

but it's true. So I'm not talking to Suri directly, but I've heard it far more often. You know what I don't hear a ton of people saying is, man, I'm so psyched. I had kids so much later. It's usually the other way around. So I'd feel for you on that one. But you have decided like as soon as you finish, you're clearly very smart and you think things out. But as soon as you start the sentence, you immediately counter that sentence. So it's like, hey, I could do this or this, but now here's all the problem. Again, I think it's a long came poly, right? Ben still is the risk management guy. I mean, this is what this reads like. So honestly, man, I think you're capable of pulling any of this stuff off. But, and I think you know that you're smart enough to know that you are, you are making it harder on yourself than just kind of going with it. Cause you know, what's funny about that time I went

out to this deal in Manhattan beach when I first showed up to town and I turned to the guy that invited me and I was like, man, I'm so much fucking older than everybody here. And he was like, so he's like, welcome to California. And I was like yeah i don't know i'm just kind of like this is pretty young dude he's like who gives a shit he's like you don't have to say how old you are and i was like yeah but i i wouldn't want to be like a lie about my age guy and the thing was is he he never thinks about any of this stuff this guy that invited me to think he's like yeah i'm older too whatever like it's on let's go let's have a great time and i'm thinking like yeah but why so when you when you already have all these kind of

mental hang-ups like you make it that much harder on yourself like why can't you meet somebody who's 36 and have kids i mean yeah you can bring up risks health-wise. I don't know what the numbers are, but is it so overwhelming that you're going out every night being like, okay, I can only factor in 30-year-olds because then by kid number three, she's 36 and we're still in a safe window?

I mean, this is a lot of overthinking. And honestly, this email, the way you present it, the overthinking is fucking you up as much as anything else is. It just is. And the only reason I know that is because I can do this kind of stuff too. Not to this level where I have all these alternative paths mapped out and then I start to shoot down why every one of these paths also can't work. So I'd say the first thing you need to do is fucking relax, just relax. All right. And I know that's easy to say, because when you want a family and it sounds like you really want a family and look like at least you're a guy in this scenario imagine you know and how much more women

have to deal with the timeline of stuff and how much that sucks for them compared to how much it sucks for us it's way worse for them so um i would i'm not going to give you any i'm not going to say yeah give me option b i'm going to tell you you've got to relax because actually I think it's going to be harder to get this right with all of this going on in your head. All right. Cause you're going to meet that 30 year old and you're going to go, Oh my God, she's got that one friend that's so annoying. And she talks about Taylor Swift. Oh, okay. So now what am I going to do? Oh, I met this 37 year old that came up when I map it up. I, your kid, three, six years, she's four, you know, like, I mean, imagine thinking about that stuff when you're ever

meeting somebody who you could potentially spend some time with. And it seems like women do like you, right? It seems like women like you, it seems like you have a lot of options. So that's great. You gave yourself an eight and a half. So be happy about the options. happy that i got an emailing going no one likes me ever and i'm only gonna have a dog you know and that sucks think about that guy how much it sucks for that guy who has none of the options that you say that you have so feel better about that have a more open-minded attitude about this whole process and relax. Kyle? Yeah. I mean, I've kind of stepped away from the thing where I'm like, uh, I'm too young to be giving life advice to anybody, but I'm going to just say, I'm going to say partly that and partly like, can you do

like a straight up real dating site where there's like women that want families? Like, I don't know. I mean, maybe it seems a little eerie, but like, like a straight up, like respected, like, I don't know. I mean, maybe it seems a little eerie, but like, like a straight up, like respected, like, you know, what is it? E harmony or like with the old white guy with the white hair, that's E harmony. He just seems like he brings people together. And I'm just wondering, like, I think that's the guy I haven't seen those commercials in a long time, but he's got glasses in the suit because the E harmony commercial host seems trustworthy and old. You feel like he's got his priorities. He has our priorities, right? It seems like hitch. He seems like hitch to me. You know what I mean? The Will Smith movie,

it seems like he knows what's right for all of us. So I just think that maybe you could give that a whirl and like, just look at women who are, you know, in your, in your age range, cause you're such a fucking numbers guy and just see if they're like interested in families now. And I think, you know know maybe that would work have you tried that if you're going to spend all your time because if you're thinking you have to meet the person and then you have to spend a year before you know if you want to get married and you're already mapped out into your second kid you kind of don't have a ton of time so you know and the older you get the more weird it's going to seem to you that they're younger so maybe try

like you know putting your specifications in e-armony. I don't know. Analytics. There you go. That one surprised me, Kyle. I did not expect eHarmony. You're hypnotized by the old guy that hosts the eHarmony commercials. He just seems like a great guy. I mean, he's 43.

He's not 53. I don't know. I have already said whatever I was going to say. So go ahead, Sruti. No, I would be kind of worried because if this guy, if he's like, okay, I want to date young 30 year olds, right?

People, girls in their early thirties, just because I want to have a family. Like, are you actually going to be finding someone that you want to be with? Are you just checking off something on your list so that you can have a family? And then that's going to come back and potentially bite you in the ass

later in life. If you don't actually like the person you're with. And then the other problem is if you end up not dating some or dating someone who's older, right. Who's more close to your age and you can't have kids, at least on your own, you know, there's always the adoption option. Are you going to hold that against like there's always like a problem that you're that you're pointing out with someone? Why don't you just let your life play out

the way it's supposed to play out, you know? And if that includes getting a dog at some point in your life and you're just kind of solo, then that's cool, too. But I think with you putting all these expectations on what you have to do and what you should do, that might not even lead you to happiness. That's the irony in this whole situation. You know what I mean? So I would say, you know, if you really want, because he seems open to all three of those options, even though he does want a family, but why can't you just see what's out there for you? If you meet a cool girl that's 32, that's great. Meet a girl that's 40, that's great. And just see what happens the next couple of years. Don't have such a stringent plan on it. Yeah. I mean, this sounds so simple, and just see what happens the next couple years don't have it don't have such a stringent plan on it yeah i mean this sounds so simple but like how about the next

person you really like you just see where it goes yeah and i know he's worried about like oh then you know the marriage kids thing and he's worried about the timetable but just i don't know be happy try to be happy that's first and foremost what's the most important thing i think bs pod had a promo code for e-harmony by the way now now that I'm remembering. I think promo code BS. I don't know if it's still active. Okay, then good. Then I think we nailed it. Is that true?

That seems like a bad promo code. No, I think it was. I think they made me sign up a long time ago. They made me sign up. Somebody tried to get me to do that at espn you remember that surity yeah yeah on harmony specifically though i remember it was some sort of app or whatever i don't know i don't remember i don't remember which one it was they were like hey would you do this in a live read and then share your experience i was like no that's not gonna happen that might have been one of the few live reads i was gonna turn down because you should get paid for those

p90x was give us five grand a month yeah got leave i remember that that was unbelievable do you remember the chrysler pacifica minivan one that they pitched to you and cannell and it was just like so not on brand for the show it was like you know lug your family around in this thing and it's like you doing reads for for a minivan yeah because they were trying to get us a van like there was some deal where they were going to get us a van for a year and we were going to have it and that was going to be part of like this big rollout and it was it was unbelievable how little thought they had put into it now because i was like the only guy without a family and i was going to be the minivan guy uh the p90x thing just so people understand that is not normal it was an absurd

amount of money and they were paying every host that's why every one of us were pitching p90x because it was an off the charts amount of money i ended up saving for a down payment on my condo from p90x and the only reason i got it is Van Pelt turned it down. And Van Pelt was like, what are you getting? I was like, yeah, it's like five grand a month. Everybody's on it right now. He's like, what are you doing? I go, I work out enough that I can incorporate a little bit in there. Gottlieb went crazy. Gottlieb went full blown, lost a ton of weight, super ripped up, started telling me how he's putting just vinegar on on his salads, like no olive oil, just vinegar. And he took it to another level. And then he sent me a picture of him with his shirt off. And he's like, I know this is kind of weird, but I just

wanted to see this. And I was like, you know what? It is weird, but you are ripped up right now. So congrats to you. He kind of looks like that Tony Horton guy. That's his name, right? Tony Horton? What's the P90X guy? He's in all his commercials. Am I making that up? thought tony horton was the guy that was on the elliptical that had like a little bit of a pony that could be it too hold on no yeah let's get uh let's get research on this no tony horton yeah p90x oh he is three now it looks good yeah he does like gotley all right so wait who is the i feel like the other guy was a tony though give me long hair blonde ponytail fitness guy was he a tony as well that was elliptical right yeah i'm a former p90x guy so i should have known um the funny thing is i said ponytail i sent my before pictures i had

to take my shirt off and my girlfriend at the time took pictures of me with my shirt off and i was pumped because the p90x guy was like jesus he's tony little tony little see there it is about the tony's he's 63 they're the same age he and tony horton are the same age that's wild maybe they are the same guy yeah just one with a wig all right um okay here we go. What's up? 6'1", 195, shredded. Guys are really, really ticking it up a notch here. He's doing P90X? wife and I recently booked a trip to Denver where we hung out with a friend who's in real estate finance. Our conversation led to another with a friend. We started seriously considering buying a house. We currently live in Michigan. It won't be in Denver for another one and a half to two years while I finish up grad school. So we were banking on being able to rent out the house until we're living in Denver full time. So you're looking at buying a house in Denver in 2021.

Have fun with that. One of my friends, his appraisal was double what it was in 2018, three years ago. Three years ago, it's double. Okay. So we got pre-approved for our home loan because my wife has a good paying and state job, but all the money for our cash down payment is going to come from some savings and other assets that I've been fortunate enough to accrue over the years. As we progress through the house hunting process, I've become less enthusiastic about using up these assets. Coming into grad school, I was planning to use these assets to minimize the amount of debt I take on or perhaps entirely avoid taking on debt if a few things fall into place. Look, some people have a really hard time with taking on debt. For whatever reason,

mortgage debt doesn't seem to count as real debt. I know that's kind of how I've looked at some transactions in the past. It's up to you. Some people just see this number that's outstanding and they lose their fucking mind over it. And then other people just say, hey, this is how business is done. And that number is not even a real number anyway. It's not like I'm ever going to be writing a check for all that because I'm going to be buying another house at some point anyway. So why would I even get bogged down with that? So people look at debt differently. And that's very, very true as I've experienced how people look at it. All right. So coming into grad school, I was planning to use these assets to minimize the amount of debt I take on, perhaps entirely avoiding taking on debt. A few things fall into place.

A financial advisor could do better than I could on telling you like, okay, well, if you're talking about college loans, the interest on the long-term payout is probably so low that you don't want to just go, hey, I'm now debt-free. You'd have to look at, I'd have to know exactly what the math is on paying it out long-term or paying down the college debt immediately, but I would rather have cash on hand than just pay down college loans. I just would. And you're still going to get approved for stuff with college loans out there. When you have college loans or you have a mortgage, that debt is looked at differently than some

asshole maxing out his credit card all the time and doing the minimum payment with a $20,000 balance. Ouch. So those are different ways that banks are going to look at you. I know that buying a home can be like trading one asset for another, but I'm a pretty debt averse person. There you go. Consider myself more responsible with money than my wife.

She's admitted to and agreed with me on. I'm starting to lose my appetite for the risk. My wife is pretty determined to buy a house because prices, especially in Denver, continue to rise. She argues that we'll end up spending more two years from now if we wait, which I think is a fair point. Given my circumstances, what would you do? Am I foolish to wanting to cash out stock savings to avoid undertaking on debt that we can very likely afford to pay off later? Is it better to minimize my school loan debt in this instance, given we'd be taking out a sizable loan for the house? The only other debt we have as a couple is a loan for my wife's car

that should be paid off in the next three years. All right, the fact that you ended it with the only other debt that we have is the car loan that should be paid off, you are clearly very responsible. You probably, and this isn't even a negative, but you almost sound prudent about it. I'm not saying you're cheaper and like that, but I could just tell, all right? Because I started answering, honestly, I should have just read the whole email all the way through, but some of the stuff I could

tell. So back to the college loan thing, we've already covered that. The car loan thing, whatever. You don't really have, I think banks look at it as like bad debt, understandable debt. You don't seem to have any of that bad debt. Now, the real thing, I'm not even worried about the debt thing as much as I'm worried about the Denver pricing thing. I mean, and by the way, that's what every fucking realtor says to you. All right? Like, hey, if you don't buy now, and realtors not in a habit of telling people to not buy houses. Think about it. Imagine if you ran into a car sales, think about it right like imagine if you ran into car sales it's like you know what i'd wait until the fall it's never going to happen never going to happen realtors are always

going to tell you something like this because that's the job and i know people think it's like an anti-realtors it's just it's just the truth it's just the truth so i personally um truth. So I personally, you look at a market like Denver and you go, now I'm going to buy. And I've been at the top of markets and bought, and I've been where I thought I was at the top, and I wasn't at the top. I've sold in Connecticut where it felt like it took forever just to be like even again. So to sit there and have anyone, certainly me as like a podcast host, to tell you, oh, now's the time to buy or don't buy now. I'm just telling you, Denver has been on fire in a way that no one would ever have predicted. I think COVID has, as we've talked about at other times, COVID has motivated people

to move more for a lifestyle, which I don't know how that's even remotely a permanent possibility now for how everybody's just going to like Denver is a sustainable city. Denver is always going to be fine. But some of these other cities that have blown up, I'm like, people are just going to live there now the rest of their lives. That doesn't seem to make a ton of sense. Uh, for me to say that there's some market real estate correction coming, it's coming. I don't know when it's coming. I don't know how these prices are sustainable. But then you have

to start playing the game of trying to middle it. And I'm not smart enough to figure that out. You probably aren't either. So the scary thing is you're buying in a market that has just been absolutely on fire. And it's one thing to take on debt. That's the loan on the mortgage versus the down payment. But it's a whole other deal when all of a sudden your house is worth like 30% less than when you bought it. And it's not just debt, but now you're like, wait, I look at this payoff number I have and now look at the new appraisal. And that turns into a whole other deal that just sucks. Every one of my friends, the first housing crisis, going back to pre-2008, it was right around. Most of my friends were early 30s.

They were buying their first homes. And I had a ton of friends that were just wiped out. All the equity wiped out because everybody was approved for housing. And so the housing thing was out of control. Did it mean it derailed their lives and their destitute afterwards? No. There are going to be things that turn into good investments. There are going to be things that fuck you up a little bit. And it didn't mean that anybody, I didn't meet any, none of my friends turned into like, Hey, it was never the same for him after that. But they, a lot of them went through it because they were buying at that time. So I probably scared you here a little bit, but the only way you can play it is you can buy now

and hope it keeps going up, which maybe even does for a couple of years. But then what, are you going to know when to sell? Like that's hard. Or you could rent and you could rent knowing I'm going to rent hoping to strike when things dip. But if you have a wife that's really down with trying to buy something now, that's a whole nother challenge because I think people like security. They like the idea. I don't love the idea of rent and paying somebody else's mortgage, but I like it a hell of a lot better than buying a house that might be worth 30% less because it seems like everybody's moving to Denver right now.

So she's probably not going to go for that. And my rent thing for two years, ride it out, see if there's a correction on the price. What if the correction happens in four years? And then you've spent rent for two years while the prices went up again, and you're going to think this advice sucks. So I don't have a clear path for you. I just know that some of these markets scare the shit out of me me and Denver will be one of them. I hope you feel better because there's no way you do after that answer. And I'm sorry for that. But there you go.

I would say, so my wife's a realtor. She almost does commercial, but does do some residential too. Must be nice. No, she's killing it. So shouts out to Maddie. But I think unless you have to buy in this market, I don't think, you know, she would recommend that you buy a house in this market. Like some people are just like, hey, I want to move and this is where I want to live. That's great.

That's cool. And they don't really care about the prices and they're going to just live their lives. But Ryan, you probably would know about more about this than I would, too, though. But, you know, if it's a long term real estate investment, like no one in the last 100 years has really taken a loss buying property, correct? It always goes up at some point. So if you're trying to in three years sell and move,

yeah, you may take a loss. But if this is some sort of long-term housing arrangement for you, you're going to be fine. Yes, but I mean, that was kind of the primary argument prior to the housing crisis that everybody was like, well, housing just goes up. And it's like, why? Like, well, just because it goes up. But it's up again now. There was a housing

crisis, and I know that was shitty. Obviously, I'm not trying to like... There's some areas, though, that were just... But chances are, Denver's a place you want to be. Yeah, Denver's like... Yeah, Denver has... I wouldn't compare Denver to North Florida. Exactly.

So, I don't know. I think it depends on how long you want to be there, but I don't think Denver to like North Florida. Exactly. Yes. Yes. So I don't know. I think it depends on how long you want to be there. But I don't think investing in that has ever really historically been in America a bad decision. Actually, Saruti, it's a great point. And it shows your real estate background and the access that you have to that kind of stuff. Because you're right. If you're going to be there, how long are you going to be there? You want to live there for 10 years?

All right. Well, now we're talking about something different. And I should have brought that up, but I'm, I'm more short term all the time now. And, uh, you know, most people are normal and moving into a house and hoping to live there 10 plus years and raise a family. And maybe they live in the house for 20 years. You know, I don't know. Uh, I'm just saying the entry point into it right now doesn't feel great. Um, and when everybody keeps doing this shit where it's like, well, you got to buy now because the prices are going to keep going up. We just did it 13 years ago where that's why everybody started buying like crazy again.

Another reason was everybody was freaked out about how the prices kept going up and they were all told over and over again, like, oh, the price is just going to keep going up. They're going to keep going up. There's some really alarming trends on home prices that are way beyond what we went through before. And I don't have the answers to it. So I'm not going to pretend to. I'm just telling you there are numbers that should scare the shit out of you. And I don't know. But everybody back then was like, oh, don't worry about it. Doesn't mean anything. Always goes up. Tell me this is a stupid thought process, though. But this is what I always thought. If there's ever a situation in this country where the housing, where houses or the property is worth nothing, or it just completely crashes, we probably have bigger problems in this

country than just the housing market, correct? There's probably something fundamentally wrong with the country. So as long as America is what it is, I kind of always feel like at some point over a 20-year period, whatever you invest in real estate-wise is probably going to hold this value or go up. Yeah. I think it also is different. I think we grew up with generations prior to us where the idea was you save, you get the down payment, you do the 30-year, you pay it off, and then that's your retirement. Boom. There you go. We're more transactional uh there are different products all over the place i mean we get to something else but i mean this is now a bigger picture economic thing where there's all sorts of stuff i can read that i'll be like oh

that's scary that doesn't seem cool like how come we can just keep doing stimulus over and over and over again like we're just fine and then you'll read something else and be like yeah we're fine you're like i don't know i don't know know. I just simply present it as being aware of both sides of the argument. There's certain markets with housing where they're so beyond the crisis numbers on pricing that

I don't think it's ridiculous to ask like, hey, so this is just going to be cool this time around? We're just cool. There will be a correction. I don't know that it would be what we went through, but I don't know how you couldn't go through

2008, 2009 and be a little spooked by stuff. That's all I'm saying. That's fair. Alright, Kyle, you want to jump in on that one? Probably not, huh? Yeah, I mean, not really. I don't have much to say about that other than I'd like to start buying a house in the next three to four years and you shot me right to the heart with your credit card statement but um that's it yeah we'll pay that shit off don't do the minimum payment

ouch all right now i feel like i actually bummed kyle out too much and for that i apologize uh i don't even now now it's just awkward i don't know what to do now all right kyle Now I feel like I actually bummed Kyle out too much. And for that, I apologize. I don't even know. Now it's just awkward. I don't know what to do now. All right, Kyle. Yeah, me neither.

I don't know what to do either. How do you think I feel? I'm kidding. I'm selling my stocks to pay my credit cards. All right. There you go. A little financial advice from Kyle as well on the way out. And thanks to Saruti. And be sure to check out the Ryan Russillo podcast and subscribe.

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